The claim behind my "But we humans can't even do that!" is a weaker one: there are some moral questions with no consensus answer, or where there is a consensus but some people flout it. In situations like these people sometimes even accuse other people outright of not knowing right from wrong, or incredulously ask, "don't you know right from wrong?"
Absence of consensus does not imply absence of objective truth
I see no necessary reason why the same issues wouldn't crop up for other, smarter intelligences.
i don't know about "necessary" but "they're smarter" is possible and reasonably likely.
Absence of consensus does not imply absence of objective truth
Correct, but that doesn't bear on my claim. Moral disagreements exist, whether or not there's objective moral truth.
i don't know about "necessary" but "they're smarter" is possible and reasonably likely.
It's possible, but I don't know any convincing arguments for why it's likely, while I can think of plausibility arguments for why it's unlikely.
One of the most annoying arguments when discussing AI is the perennial "But if the AI is so smart, why won't it figure out the right thing to do anyway?" It's often the ultimate curiosity stopper.
Nick Bostrom has defined the "Orthogonality thesis" as the principle that motivation and intelligence are essentially unrelated: superintelligences can have nearly any type of motivation (at least, nearly any utility function-bases motivation). We're trying to get some rigorous papers out so that when that question comes up, we can point people to standard, and published, arguments. Nick has had a paper accepted that points out the orthogonality thesis is compatible with a lot of philosophical positions that would seem to contradict it.
I'm hoping to complement this with a paper laying out the positive arguments in favour of the thesis. So I'm asking you for your strongest arguments for (or against) the orthogonality thesis. Think of trying to convince a conservative philosopher who's caught a bad case of moral realism - what would you say to them?
Many thanks! Karma and acknowledgements will shower on the best suggestions, and many puppies will be happy.